caption:THE EXODUS: Done in 1928, this oil on canvas
by Robert Spencer shows the somber brilliance of his later work.
The Spencer exhibit will be in the Wachovia Gallery at the James
A. Michener Museum through September 19. .end
of caption

Robert
Spencer's Art: A Balance of Spirit and Matter

Stuart
Mitchner

Remember the first time you drew a house? I mean
the primal moment when your pencil or crayon made the primal
shape, the squares for windows on either side of the door,
the flat roof (or, if you were inspired, the slanted roof),
and the chimney. You had to have a chimney, for Christmas Eve.

The houses in Robert Spencer's paintings made me feel something
like that special moment all over again. I don't know
why his houses had this effect on me. Dwellings like the one
in "Summertime," the painting featured on the Michener
Museum's publicity material, can still be seen in New Hope
and Lambertville and along the Delaware and its adjacent canal.

When
I first heard about this exhibit I passed it off with a shrug.
I was not tempted to make a special effort to see the work
of a local artist billed as part of "The Summer of Pennsylvania
Impressionism." I thought it might offer nothing more
than a series of conventional Bucks County landscapes, river
or canal scenes. If I hadn't had other reasons for driving to
Doylestown that day, I might never have discovered the stirring,
spirited work of Robert Spencer.

The exhibit's title
is "The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds," which promises something
more challenging than work that can be patronized as that of a local
artist. In fact, the painter never names the cities and the towns.
He expressly avoids being pinned down to Bucks County or Pennsylvania.
His mind runs on universals. You can assume the urban scenes
come out of Philadelphia and New York since as a Bucks County
resident, Spencer lived within easy reach of those two cities.
But his cities and towns are creations, not representations.

Robert Spencer suffered bouts of depression throughout
his life and endured a turbulent marriage. In July 1931, after
a particularly ferocious clash with his wife, he shot himself.
He was only 52. If you know this at the outset, you may be
tempted to read the exhibit with the painter's fate in mind,
looking for telltale clues or intimations.

The exhibition
commentary by senior curator Brian H. Peterson includes this quote
from a letter the artist wrote a few months before his death:
"The art of today is as chaotic as is society. It does
not seem to be going anywhere, just traveling in aimless circles
at full speed." Spencer loves the "wine, food and
flesh" of Renoir. He finds Matisse and Picasso empty, inhuman,
mere "brushstroke and intellect: If that is how wine and
food and life should taste, the world for me is dead."
He mentions his own quest for the "balance of spirit and
matter."

I don't believe in reading a painter's
work in the light of his life. But I believe a truly effective
display of his paintings, like this one, will suggest the life
of his art in a way that illuminates, or, in the best work, transcends
biography. Spencer's art achieves that balance of spirit
and matter.

As the curator points out, Spencer liked
buildings that were "old, beat-up, abandoned. He often
painted the back of a building instead of the front." The
canalside houses in "Summertime" are viewed from the
back. An interest in seeing the hidden side of things seems
to fit with the artist's reluctance to specify the locales
he's painting. If you imagine the front of a house as
a face, choosing to paint the back suggests looking beyond the facade.
The notion of the face of a house also brought me back to that
first moment of moving a crayon toward the primal image that
sometimes developed human features as the windows on either
side of the doorway became eyes.

Another work that flashed
me back to childhood was the Cezannesque "The Two Shores"
(1915), where the toylike buildings resemble miniature wooden
houses on the floor of a child's room. The influence of
Cezanne was no longer in evidence a decade later when no less
a painter than Pierre Bonnard remarked that Spencer was "in
the full vigor of his talent, which is great. His art does
not resemble European art, a rare fact in America."

A
year later F. Newlin Price, a friend and art critic, observed
that Spencer idealized canal barges and converted "dark
silk factories into dream castles." Based on the paintings
at the Michener, the mills and factories Spencer painted are
dream castles only if you think of dark fairy tales or the
battlements of Mordor. These looming masses are rich with atmosphere
but can hardly be called romantic or idealized when they have
been shaped by an artist with an eye for the back of things,
the nondescript, the anonymous. When asked what people made
in his mills, Spencer said "Damned if I know."

Look
at his skies. The sky in "Closing Hour at the Mill"
seems downright cheerful compared to the gloomy workaday human
scene: it's a patchy blue, stippled with clouds. But look at
the sky in one of the darker later works, "The Exodus,"
in which a modern-day Moses, as a Hasidic Jew, is leading his people
anywhere but to the promised land (this, some five years before Hitler
came into power); the city looms behind him, massively grim and
the sky above it patchy and yellow with a deathly pallor, the
miasma of the modern world the painter saw whirling into chaos.

The
four paintings that conclude the exhibit surpass the others in
sheer intensity and scope. They are larger and more explicit.
Suddenly, you realize, this "Bucks County artist"
has become a contemporary of Reginald Marsh's. He also
has learned a thing or two from Goya and Daumier with the close-to-caricature
human figures and from Delacroix with the crowded range of
the action. The titles tell the story. Along with "The Exodus,"
you have "Mob Vengeance" (1930) where a woman, her
gown torn, one breast bared, is preparing to hang the victim
from a lamp post; "The Seed of Revolution" (1928)
where the mob is heading toward us, a powerful woman once again
the focal figure carried aloft by the crowd, a citadel-like
building in the background; and, finally, "Crucifixion"
(1931) which is more openly contemporary than the others; the
workman hammering "INRI" on top of the cross might
be some ordinary workman going about his business.

Robert
Spencer's masterful "The Exodus" was produced at
a time when he was excitedly informing his friend Duncan Phillips
(eventual founder of the Phillips Collection in Washington,
D.C.) that he was "cutting deeper and with a freedom from
painting conventions that I never had before.... I dare to
say what is in my mind with conviction and a free brush and palette."
The works done from that point in 1928 until his death justify
these words, words that suggest that, however he ended his
life, this amazing artist did not "go gently" into
Dylan Thomas's "good night."

"The Cities,
The Towns, The Crowds" will be on view in the Wachovia Gallery at
the James A. Michener Art Museum through September 19. There is
a charge of $4 in addition to regular admission.